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Hard Newtown questions

The three largest mental health hospitals in the U.S. are the psychiatric wings at Riker’s Island in New York, Cook County Jail in Chicago and Los Angeles County Jail. This ex post facto patch is not a credible replacement for coercive institutionalization of those who pose a danger to themselves or others.

After every gun trauma, people call for a “conversation” about how to manage these disorders of the mind, but like the gun “conversation” that liberals want to have, it never advances. A Hartford judge named Robert K. Killian Jr. has been arguing for a bill in the Connecticut legislature that would give the state the authority to forcibly medicate and stabilize people with severe mental disabilities like schizophrenia for up to 120 days. Judge Killian is working from his own experience with repeat offenders, but Democrats keep killing the bill on civil liberties grounds.

A good-faith effort to modernize mental health law also requires the political right to answer some hard questions. The often squalid and brutal mental asylum system of the 1950s isn’t coming back, and it shouldn’t. Can the social service planners who can’t run health care, education or public housing be trusted to identify when erratic, disruptive or alarming behavior tips over into pathological danger? Probably not, but states with so-called assisted outpatient treatment laws have shown results in limiting violence among the mentally ill.

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Speaking as a pro-gun conservative, I think “less guns/more guns” is the wrong question to be asking. I think a much better question would be, “What do we do about the mentally ill once they’ve proven they’re a danger to themselves or others?”

“What do we do about the mentally ill once they’ve proven they’re a danger to themselves or others?”

gryphon202 on December 26, 2012 at 10:03 AM

I suggest housing them with a liberal. All the mentally ill and deranged who can be a danger to others can be paired with a liberal. The touchy feely liberals will then have an outlet for all their compassion and good will and leave the rest of us alone.

Their “good intentions” are making us all poorer and will eventually kill us.

Efforts undertaken to remove the lost-mother-trucker from the saddle of his oh-so-very-comfortable hobby horse are doomed to failure.

You are, of course, correct about the seminal question dealing with how the law deals with the mentally ill.

A byproduct of the Obama economy is an alarming rise in the cases of mental illness being seen in the nation’s emergency rooms. Here at home, the emergency room becomes the default warehouse of those who cannot care for themselves, are a danger to themselves and others or have been thrown out of other resources for behavior related issues.

As much as the left rails about the plight of the mentally ill, it is they who are chiefly responsible for their current state of affairs.

They could (and are trying to) remove every single firearm from private hands in the United States and it would do nothing to improve the epidemic of mental illness.

I suggest housing them with a liberal. All the mentally ill and deranged who can be a danger to others can be paired with a liberal. The touchy feely liberals will then have an outlet for all their compassion and good will and leave the rest of us alone.

Their “good intentions” are making us all poorer and will eventually kill us.

When the gun instructor got through describing the restrictive gun laws in Boston and in Massachusetts — which are just about the toughest in the nation — one student asked: “If the gun laws are so tough, how come there are shootings every night in Boston?” “That’s a good question,” the instructor replied. “The answer is that the gun laws are aimed at the good guys, the law-abiding people, like you and me. The bad guys ignore the law and get all the guns they want.”

FYI, until the Leftists at the ACLU successfully shut it down, there was a large mental hospital right in the middle of…Newtown.

Now look at somebody like Jared Loughner. Even AFTER he was arrested and was determined to have mental issues, there were all sorts of legal wranglings over whether the state could forcibly make him take medications.